The Pact
Jennifer Sturman

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would never have been written without Michele Jaffe, who had the great misfortune to read every draft and provided invaluable encouragement and input.

Laura Langlie, my agent, guided me through this process with a sure hand, unflagging confidence and good humor. She even pretended to take my theory of jinxing seriously.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Farrin Jacobs, Margaret Marbury and the entire team at Red Dress Ink for (however clichéd it may sound) making a dream come true.

My college roommates—Anne Coolidge, Holly Edmonds, Heather Jackson and Gretchen Peters—kindly allowed me to steal bits and pieces of themselves and our past (liberally seasoned with artistic license, of course!). Rulonna Neilson, ad hoc image consultant, shepherded me through the jungle that is Bloomingdale’s cosmetics department and captured the moment for posterity. Meg Cabot offered the wise perspective of an industry veteran and more champagne than was probably good for either of us.

My mother, Judith Sturman, my sister-in-law, Lindsay Jewett Sturman, author Gini Hartzmark and friends Stefanie Reich Offit and Karen Bisgeier Zucker graciously served as early readers, critics and sounding boards. Finally, my father, Joseph Sturman, and my brothers, Ted and Dan Sturman, managed neither to laugh at nor tease me about the excellent use to which I was putting my MBA.

Thank you all.

This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my parents.

PROLOGUE

I met Chris at the beginning of my junior year. He was tall and handsome, with thick dark hair and green eyes fringed with the sort of lashes that only boys seem to get but that girls covet. He sat next to me one September afternoon in Modern Art and Abstraction. I dropped my pen, he picked it up, our eyes met, and I fell head over heels in love with a sociopath.

Of course, it took nearly six months for me to realize that he was, in fact, a sociopath. He was a senior and a bit of a mystery to my circle of friends. He’d transferred to Harvard from a small liberal arts college out west, and he had an air about him that was part Mark Darcy and part James Bond. He swept me off my feet, and I was more than willing to be swept.

The first time I realized something was off was the night he figured out how to call in to my answering machine and play back the messages. I was at the library working on a paper, but he was convinced that I was cheating on him. A few months and a number of similar incidents later, I was out of love and desperate to be rid of him.

He wasn’t easy to break up with, but after several tedious conversations that began with “We’ve got to talk” and ended with him still thinking I was his girlfriend, he finally gave up. Soon I heard that he was dating a sophomore, who no doubt was just as enchanted by his attentions as I’d originally been.

The night my breakup with Chris became official, my four roommates and I rose to the occasion with a Girls’ Night Out, a ritual that we’d perfected since its inception freshman year. We would start with blender drinks in our common room in Lowell House and then embark on a pub crawl in Harvard Square, inevitably ending up at Shay’s, our favorite wine bar on JFK Street.

By the time we arrived at Shay’s that fateful evening it was after midnight. The tables were crowded with a mix of undergrads and some business school students from across the river, easily identifiable by their conservative dress and bottles of imported beer. We found seats on the front terrace and ordered the usual—a bottle of cheap red wine to be shared by everyone except Jane, who ordered a Black and Tan. As we waited for our drinks, I began lamenting my poor judgment for the umpteenth time that evening. “How could I have been so stupid?” I moaned. I was a little worse for wear after five hours of fairly enthusiastic drinking.

Hilary, never one to mince words, had a ready reply. “I don’t know. Was he that great in bed?”

Luisa exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke with impatience. “Have a little sympathy, Hil. Rachel was in love. Her first love. Everyone acts like an idiot the first time.”

Hilary snorted her reply but held her tongue while the waiter unloaded our drinks. Emma looked around the table expectantly. She was wearing a sleeveless Indian print dress and woven leather sandals, her mass of dark blond hair hanging loose down her back.

Jane took a sip of her Black and Tan and gave me a good-natured smile. “We all knew that you would come to your senses sooner or later. It happened to be later than we would have liked, but the important thing is that it happened.”

“But why didn’t I listen to you?” I asked. “You all tried to tell me what a nightmare he was—God only knows how many times—and I just didn’t want to hear it.”

“You were doing what you wanted to do,” said Jane.

“Even though what you wanted to do was completely fucked up. I mean, it was clear the guy was bad news from day one.” Hilary poured wine into her glass and passed the bottle to Luisa. “He was so full of himself.”

“He was not bad news from day one,” Jane protested. “He did a lot of things right at first. Remember all of the flowers? And when he took Rachel to Walden Pond? You have to give him at least a few points for that.”

“He’s a man,” said Luisa, stubbing out her cigarette and preparing to light another. “It’s a waste of time to dissect what he did right and what he did wrong.” She pointed the end of the unlit cigarette at me and locked her dark-eyed gaze on mine. “The most important thing is to learn to enjoy men but also to take care of yourself. Next time you’ll know better.”

“But what if I don’t know better?” I asked. “What if the next one is equally awful but in a different way, so that I don’t recognize that he’s awful?”

“Maybe next time you’ll listen to us,” said Jane.

“That’s right,” agreed Hilary. “You’ll remember what a fool you made of yourself with Chris, and you’ll listen.”

“You know, Hil, you haven’t always had the greatest judgment yourself. Remember Tommy Fitzgerald? And what about that guy from the Owl Club? What was his name again? The one with the—?”

“You’re one to talk, Jane. Remember freshman year when you and Sean were taking a ‘break’ and you started going out with that asshole from the crew team?”

“Okay, enough,” said Luisa. “We’ve all made mistakes—there’s no need to catalog them.”

“Luisa’s right. None of us has a very good record on assessing the men in our lives. And when push comes to shove, the rest of us always figure it out before the one who’s actually in the relationship.” Emma was so quiet that when she did speak people listened closely. We were all silent for a moment, considering her words.

“Well, the point is that if any of you come to me and tell me my boyfriend’s an asshole, I promise I’ll listen,” said Jane. This was easy for her to say, given that Sean was as close to the ideal boyfriend as a mere mortal could be. Still, her voice held a challenge in it for the rest of us. She looked around the table.

“Me, too,” said Emma, thoughtfully. “In fact, I’d even make a pact on that.”

“Well, I’d probably already know the guy was an asshole, but I’d listen to you,” said Hilary. “You can count me in.”

“No argument here, especially if it means that I never have to go through a relationship like this again,” I said.

“Luisa? What about you?” asked Emma.

She gave a slight shrug. “We’ve made so many pacts that it’s hard to keep them all straight. Remember the one about giving up caffeine? That lasted about five minutes. Why should this one be any different? What happens if we all promise to listen to each other but then we don’t? Then what?”

“Then the rest of us take matters into our own hands,” replied Hilary. “Obviously. We waste the guy.”

That made everybody laugh. “Come on, Luisa, don’t be such a skeptic,” said Jane. “This one’s serious.”

“Fine, fine.” She caved in to our pleading with another shrug of her shoulders. “I’m in.”

“Good. Then it’s unanimous. We’re making a pact,” said Emma.

“A pact,” agreed Jane.

“Let’s toast!” urged Hilary.

We laughed and clinked our glasses together—all except Jane, who hated when people clinked. In unison, we drank.

None of us would have guessed where this pact would lead.

CHAPTER 1

Perhaps the only thing worse than getting drunk by accident is not being able to get drunk on purpose. I’d switched from champagne to vodka tonics during the second course, but I still felt as clearheaded as the valedictorian at an AA graduation. And somehow calling for tequila shots seemed unseemly in these staid country club surroundings. Instead, I asked the waiter for another vodka tonic, meeting his raised eyebrows with an innocent smile and a request to go easy on the tonic.

The Fates were conspiring against me this evening, I all too soberly reflected. Here I was at my best friend’s rehearsal dinner, and rather than overflowing with joy I wanted to put my head down on the crisp linen tablecloth and weep. And not because of the bridesmaid’s dress I was scheduled to wear the following evening at half past six. (Although I was still curious as to how Emma, who I sincerely believed had only honorable intentions towards us all, had managed to find a style and color that didn’t flatter even one of her four bridesmaids.)

No, the dress and the prospect of wearing it were just fanning the flames of my distress. And while I dreaded the toast I would shortly have to make, it was merely fuel for the fire.

The horror, I thought. The horror.

If I turned my head to the right and counted over three seats, I could see the reason for my silent anguish in the flesh, smugly resplendent in a custom-made charcoal pinstriped suit and vivid Hermés tie, his black hair slicked neatly back from a widow’s peak.

Richard.

He was talking to a client who’d stopped by the table to say hello. He suddenly looked my way, as if he could feel the weight of my eyes upon him. He met my gaze with a smarmy wink and returned to his conversation.

I didn’t know then that a smarmy wink from Richard should have been the least of my worries compared to everything else the weekend held in store. I stifled a shudder and took a big gulp of my fresh drink, trying to ignore how much it tasted like insect repellent and fighting off yet another pang of anxiety. The clock was ticking, moving inexorably toward disaster; the ceremony that would bind Emma to Richard was to take place in less than twenty-four hours.

I sent a desperate glance around the table for moral support, a reassuring word of some sort. The seat directly to my right was empty, reserved for the best man, whose flight from the West Coast had been delayed. Not that I expected any friend of Richard’s to be remotely comforting in this situation. Emma, sitting next to Richard, had turned in her seat to greet one of the many well-wishers who’d come by to speak to her. She’d been so busy with the stream of visitors that she’d barely touched the food on her plate, and the shy smile on her face was starting to look more than a little forced.

To my left sat Matthew, the sort of guy you could always count on to help you out of a difficult spot. Tonight, however, he’d be the least appropriate person to turn to. He hated Richard as much, if not more, than any of us. With good reason. Matthew was the one Emma should be marrying. Unfortunately, this was glaringly obvious to everyone except Emma. I felt indignant on Matthew’s behalf but more than a bit frustrated by his seemingly calm acceptance of the situation. If only he’d made Emma realize how right they were for each other, had taken action years ago, then everything would be different. But the patience and sensitivity that made him such a good doctor seemed to have rendered him tragically unassertive in his personal affairs. And if he was upset tonight he was hiding it well, slicing into his apple tart with surgical precision and chatting good-naturedly with Jane, who sat on his other side.

A cousin of Emma’s sat between Jane and Hilary, and Hilary was trying her best to flirt with him, although his attempts at risqué banter were painfully bland. Still, Hilary felt it was important to practice even on the most unpromising of males. The flush that had stained his cheeks from the first glimpse she’d offered him of her cleavage had yet to subside. I almost felt sorry for him.

Hilary and her cleavage were flanked by Jane’s husband, Sean, who was flanked in turn by Luisa. From the stoic set of Sean’s usually relaxed features, I assumed that he had chivalrously assured Luisa that her cigarette wouldn’t bother him at all. They were swathed in a blue halo of Gauloises-scented smoke. A colleague of Richard’s who was serving as a groomsman the next day occupied the remaining seat at the table. I’d spoken to him during the cocktail hour and ascertained that he was entirely harmless but equally dull. He was listening to Sean and Luisa with a glazed look.

Everyone was deep in conversation with somebody else. Except, of course, me. Alas. I belatedly remembered that I’d promised myself the last time I went dateless to a wedding weekend that I would never do it again. There was nothing more depressing, nothing that could make me feel more like a total freak of nature, than to be hopelessly alone at an event that celebrated coupledom, however mismatched this particular couple was. It was fine for Hilary—she was fiercely protective of her single independence; it would never occur to her to wallow in self-pity just because she didn’t have a boyfriend by her side. Luisa had Isobel, her partner of nearly three years, waiting for her when she returned to South America. All she had to worry about was fighting off her parents’ pressure to marry and procreate. Jane and Sean had celebrated their tenth anniversary in June, just another in what would certainly be a long line of anniversaries commemorating their happy pairing. And I could hardly take comfort in the knowledge that while Emma had Richard, she was embarking on the biggest mistake of her life.

I sighed and flipped through my notes one more time, praying for a sudden natural disaster that could save me from making the toast. An earthquake was more than I could hope for in this part of the country, but perhaps I could bribe a waiter to pull the fire alarm? Not my waiter, of course. He made it clear from the way he set down my most recent drink that he wasn’t doing me any more favors tonight, no matter how sweetly I smiled up at him. If it weren’t so noisy I would have sworn he clucked his tongue as he moved on to the next table.

Resigned, I turned my attention back to the careful outline I’d made. I wasn’t afraid of public speaking, not by a long shot. In my line of work, the ability to comfortably address large groups was almost a prerequisite. My colleagues in Mergers and Acquisitions at Winslow, Brown, as well as the board members of assorted clients, hostile dissenters at shareholder meetings—even full auditoriums of Harvard Business School students, eager to learn more about how to gain entrée to a top-tier investment banking firm—I’d stood before them all and delivered talks ranging from detailed slide presentations to improvised monologues. I was skilled at laying out the facts about a merger or joint venture in a professional and persuasive manner and in beating back questions that were designed to embarrass with logic, composure, and eloquence. Yet none of that was enough to prepare me for toasting the imminent merger of my best friend with Satan.

I was pushing away a mental image of the shrieking mouth in Munch’s The Scream when Emma’s mother caught my eye from her seat at the next table and discreetly tapped her watch. It was customary, I knew, for the maid of honor to give the first toast at the rehearsal dinner, and Lily Furlong was a stickler for tradition. There was no escaping it—the time had come.

I sighed again and drained the last of my vodka tonic for one final drop of liquid courage. Slowly, I scraped my chair back and stood, champagne glass in hand. My knife rapping against its crystal made a sharp, pinging noise that echoed in the cavernous room, and the hum of voices from the tables around me faded into an expectant hush.

Richard had spared no expense this evening, I noted, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he was planning to write the entire affair off as a business expenditure. This rehearsal dinner was by no means a small gathering for the family and wedding party. Rather, Richard had been sure to invite everybody who was anybody among both his friends and those of the Furlongs, which was likely a far more fruitful hunting ground. None of Richard’s family was present, although I secretly wondered if he even had one. It was entirely possible that Richard had crawled out from under a rock somewhere, already fully formed. Meanwhile, half the Social Register was in attendance, not to mention the leading lights of the New York arts and literary scene, seated at round tables covered with starched white linens and graced with extravagant floral arrangements. Perhaps the even greater surprise was that so many of them had made the long drive up to this remote corner of the Adirondacks, committing themselves to a weekend at one of the handful of motels and overly cutesy bed-and-breakfasts the area had to offer, not to mention battling rush-hour traffic on a Friday afternoon in August to make it here in time for cocktails and dinner. This was surely more of a tribute to their great esteem for the Furlongs and Emma than any warmth of feeling for a swine like Richard Mallory.

I cleared my throat once more, deliberately stalling to make sure that any natural disaster had ample time to strike. But none was forthcoming. I plastered a brave smile on my face, took a deep breath, and reluctantly launched into my toast.

“I’m Rachel Benjamin, and I have the honor of serving as Emma’s maid of honor tomorrow afternoon.” This simple declaration was met by friendly applause.

“I first met Emma our freshman year at Harvard. Actually, we met the very first day. We were assigned to the same dorm room, and we were each eager to establish ourselves as the most considerate roommate. Neither of us wanted to confess whether we preferred the top or bottom bunk, the left side of the closet or the right side of the closet, the desk by the window or the desk by the door, for fear that we would offend the other.” An appreciative chuckle bubbled up from the audience. It was an easy crowd, I sensed, despite the impressive pedigrees scattered throughout the large dining room of the country club.

“We resorted to that most scientific of methods, one that you would expect to be used at only the most elite institutions of higher learning, to figure out who should take which bunk, which side of the closet, and which desk.

“I’m referring, of course, to the sophisticated discipline known colloquially as Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Much merriment from the audience at this. I briefly debated ditching my cushy corporate career on Wall Street and my steady, sizable paycheck to take my act on the road.

“I don’t mean to embarrass Emma in front of you all—she did her best. But she was no match for me. I handily beat her, two out of three. And, trying to endear myself to the woman with whom I’d be sharing those less-than-spacious quarters, I tried to choose the options that she seemed to want least.

“She’d mentioned that she was a painter—I assumed that she’d want to be able to gaze out the window, so I took the desk by the door. I also chose the left side of the closet, the side farthest from the mirror and the bathroom.

“And then came the most important decision of all—should I take the top or bottom bunk?

“My noble intentions warred with my most base desires. As a small child, I begged for a bunk bed. Nothing seemed more glamorous than to sleep high above the floor in a top bunk. Tantrums, hunger strikes—even being nice to my brothers—none of my efforts could melt my parents’ stony resistance. My pleas fell on deaf ears, and I had to make do with a beruffled canopy until well into my teens.” Hilary emitted a mock moan of sympathy. I paused to glare at her before continuing.

“Here I was with this tempting opportunity—away from home for the first time, the world my oyster, and the top bunk beckoning me upward. I was torn, but I made the right choice, the selfless choice, and opted for the bottom bunk—I gave the top bunk to Emma. In fact, I insisted that she have it, despite her protests. And her protests were quite vehement. But I could see through her words, and I held firm to my generous choice.

“For the entire year, Emma climbed up to the top bunk while I tried to suppress the envy that threatened to overwhelm me. When she offered to switch midyear, I swallowed my impulses and told her that wouldn’t be necessary. After all, there would be other dorm rooms in the coming years. But the next year we moved into a large suite with Luisa and Hilary and Jane—we all had single beds. Ditto the next two years. My one opportunity for a top bunk—selflessly sacrificed to the cause of friendship.

“The summer after we graduated from college, Emma and I traveled to France. On a sunny June day, we found ourselves at the Eiffel Tower. There was a long line of tourists, but I wanted to see the view from the top. Emma waited patiently next to me for nearly two hours before our turn came. We squished into the elevator with our fellow sightseers and waited until the doors opened onto the top deck of the monument. I rushed to the railing, excited to see Paris spread out below us. But after a few minutes, I realized that Emma wasn’t beside me.

“Instead, she was standing with her back against the wall, as far from the railing as she could be, her eyes screwed shut and her complexion a decidedly unbecoming shade of green.

“It was only then that she admitted to me that she was terrified of heights. ‘But what about freshman year?’ I asked. ‘You loved having the top bunk.’

“‘No,’ she confessed. ‘It’s just that I thought you wanted the bottom bunk.’” The room erupted in laughter. They couldn’t understand how Emma’s absurd need to please had manifested itself in so many other, less humorous ways. I waited for the laughter to subside before I went on.

“I tell this story for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to make it clear that trying to beat me at Rock, Paper, Scissors is a waste of time. I always, always win.” More laughter. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for the mushy part.

“Second, and more importantly, I wanted to give all of you a sense of what sort of person Emma is. The list of glowing adjectives could go on forever, starting with giving, loyal, and trusting. But I worry that the story doesn’t do justice to all of the other traits that make her so special—her quiet insight, her subtle wit, her incredible talent.

“I feel privileged to have Emma for a friend. I think I speak for all of her bridesmaids when I say that we are honored that she wants us to stand up with her tomorrow, and that we hope that she has some small inkling of how much we want her to be happy. I trust that Richard realizes how very fortunate he is to have Emma in his life.” I hesitated, wondering if my last sentence had sounded sincere. Richard was far too arrogant ever to understand how lucky he was to be sitting at the same table as Emma tonight, let alone marrying her.

Raising my glass, I scanned the assembled guests. “Please join me in drinking a toast to Emma.”

“To Emma,” the crowd joined in. I sat down amidst a cascade of clinking glasses.

Embarrassed, I looked over at her. A silent tear rolled down her face. “Thank you,” she mouthed.

“Of course,” I mouthed back. What else could I do?

CHAPTER 2

“Well done,” a voice said, low and intimate and positioned mere inches from my right ear. It was a warm, deep voice, and it sent a distinctly pleasant tremor down my spine.

Startled, I turned to establish its owner.

The seat next to me, the one that had been empty all through dinner, was now filled by the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

He wasn’t beautiful in the obvious sense—the male model, movie star sense. In fact, by traditional measures, he was fairly nondescript. Thick, sand-colored hair, a regular-size nose, normal-size eyes topped by straight eyebrows that were golden at the edges, as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. He was altogether not my type—as a general rule, I preferred men who were dark, brooding and aloof. Still, I found myself wondering what our children would look like. My cheeks flushed in that lovely way that makes my freckles stand out as if I’ve been spattered with mud.

“I’m Peter Forrest,” he said with a quiet smile, displaying even, white teeth. “Richard’s best man.”

My heart slid like a lead weight from the fluttering position it had assumed in my throat down to the depths of my stomach. The glowing mental photograph I’d constructed of our two (perhaps three) perfect children morphed from color to black-and-white and then faded into shadow. Surely a close friend of Richard’s was, by definition, an evil troll, even if every molecule in my body begged to differ. I should have known that any handsome unattached stranger must have a tragic flaw.

“My flight was late,” he continued, oblivious to the fact that his previous words had destroyed any potential for our future together. “But I got here just in time for your toast. I’m glad I don’t have to give mine until tomorrow. You’re a tough act to follow.” As if flattery could mitigate his damning association with Richard.

“I’m Rachel,” I said, hoping that my voice didn’t betray the speed with which I’d just internally staged and discarded courtship, marriage and procreation. “Emma’s maid of honor. We’re friends from college.” I gave myself a swift mental kick in the shin—after all, I’d just spent several minutes explaining precisely that to the entire room. Then I gave myself another mental kick in the shin for caring about the impression I was making on one of Richard’s cronies. “But I guess you know that. And how do you know Richard?” I asked, trying to mask the despair I felt. If only his answer could in some way absolve him of the intimacy implied in being Richard’s best man.

“Oh, I’ve known Richard since birth, practically. We grew up together in San Francisco, went to the same school and everything. At least until Richard came east for boarding school.” I’d known Richard was from San Francisco, but I never gave it much thought. Yet when Peter said San Francisco, my mind instantly conjured up images of Peter on a sailboat, Peter skiing on an Alpine trail, Peter hiking up a mountain, and Peter doing all of those other healthy things for which the Bay Area is famous. As quickly as these images flashed before my eyes, I struggled to replace them with ones that more accurately would reflect the ways in which any friend of Richard’s must pass his leisure time—Scotch drinking, cigar smoking, shooting small defenseless animals, and amusing his like-minded pals with misogynistic limericks. All my mental maneuverings, however, met with little success.

“San Francisco,” I said, trying my best to act like a normal person making conversation with her dinner partner. “It must be hard for you to see much of each other when you’re so far away.” I was grasping at straws, I knew, but somewhere inside me burned a small flame of hope that hadn’t yet been extinguished by the facts at hand.

He hesitated a moment before answering, contemplating the bubbles in his glass of champagne, as if he were trying to word his response with care. Then he turned his gaze back to me. His eyes were the color of rich, dark chocolate. “It is hard. In fact, I’ve only seen him a couple of times since we started college. His mother moved away from San Francisco years ago, and I don’t think he’s been back to the West Coast since then except for maybe a couple of quick business trips.”

My brain sucked up that fact with the power of an industrial-strength magnet and allowed my heart to register a flicker of pleasure. After all, you can forgive anyone for his childhood friends; it’s just the friends people choose when they’re old enough to know better that you can hold against them. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why Richard would ask someone he was barely in touch with to be his best man.

As if reading my thoughts, Peter leaned toward me and confided, “I have to admit, I was a bit surprised when Richard called and asked me to be in the wedding. It must have taken some doing for him just to track down my phone number. But it’s hard to say no to someone you’ve known all your life.” My heart gave another flutter when he said this; loyalty, even to someone as vile as Richard, was a noble trait, however undeserving its object might be. But Peter’s words still didn’t explain why Richard had asked him in the first place. Was Richard that bereft of close friends? It was entirely possible, I guessed; I was all too aware that to know Richard well was to despise him.

Richard’s tedious colleague stood to give the next toast, and Peter turned his head to listen. This provided me with an excellent opportunity to observe his profile, the strong set of his jaw, and the handful of prematurely gray hairs at his temple. I pretended to listen to the toast, laughing at the appropriate moments, but mostly I was busy looking at Peter’s left hand, loosely gripping his champagne glass, and thinking about how nice his left earlobe was. I caught myself unconsciously leaning toward it, the better to give it a gentle nibble. “Behave yourself,” I admonished my wayward id.

The toasts went on, as they usually do, interminably. It turned out that I’d had no need to fear the audience’s level of sobriety. A number of drunken but earnest souls, some of whom barely knew either the bride or the groom, stood to bless Richard and Emma’s union. Finally, the last well-meaning speaker had slurred his way through a wandering speech and sunk back into his seat. I saw Emma’s mother give the bandleader a discreet but urgent hand signal. Her sense of etiquette was extraordinarily well developed, and the endless toasting and clinking of glasses was probably like a form of torture to her. She hated public displays of emotion and frivolous sentimentality more than anyone I’d ever met; if I found the toasts tiresome, she probably found them excruciating.

Peter turned toward me as the band began to play. “Care to dance?” he asked.

“I’d love to,” I answered, quickly, before my brain could thoroughly analyze the situation and pass down a judgment that would forbid physical contact of any sort. He helped me up from my chair and took my hand in his. His palm was pleasantly warm and dry. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jane and Luisa exchange a bemused look.

Peter led me onto the dance floor and swung me smoothly into a fox-trot. I silently thanked my parents for those nights as a child when my mother had played our old battered piano while my father twirled me around the living room, my bare feet resting atop his polished shoes as he taught me the elements of ballroom dance that he’d learned long ago in Moscow.

I was so appreciative of how well Peter led and so busy refereeing the battle raging between disparate internal constituents that I almost forgot to pay attention to anything he was saying.

“—how talented she is,” I heard him say. “I mean, I’d heard her name, but I’ve never really followed the art scene. And somehow I never pictured Richard with an artist. I was in New York on business a few months ago, and I stopped into the gallery to see her show. I had no idea—I mean, I didn’t know what to expect, really, but I was incredibly impressed. I would have been interested in buying a couple of pieces if everything hadn’t already been sold. Although, I doubt I would have been able to afford anything. The prices all seemed to have an extra zero or two on them.” He was talking about Emma’s most recent exhibition, I realized, which had opened at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in May and met with unqualified critical praise.

“Everything was spoken for by the end of the opening,” I told him proudly. “And the reviews were great, too. As soon as I can get a day off, I’m going to have to dredge up all of my old notebooks and letters to see if Emma doodled in any of the margins. I could make a killing on eBay and retire. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” He laughed.

“What do you do now that you don’t get days off and you want to retire so badly?”

“Ugh,” I replied. “Do you really want to know?” For some reason, finding out about my profession was usually enough to send most men running. Not, I reminded myself, that I should care what any friend of Richard’s thought of me or my chosen career.

“Of course. It can’t be any worse than hawking your best friend’s personal memorabilia on the Web.”

“I’m an investment banker,” I confessed. “Mergers and Acquisitions at Winslow, Brown.” I cocked my head and waited for him to gasp with horror and run, shrieking, from the dance floor.

Instead, he chuckled. “You say that like you’re a bounty hunter or a paid assassin.”

“Not too far off,” I said. “Even worse, it’s so 1987.”

“Hardly. I’m sure it’s very high-powered. All of that glamorous wheeling and dealing.” There was a teasing edge to his voice.

I laughed. “I guess it depends on how you define glamorous.” I’d spent far more sleepless nights crunching numbers and cranking out client presentations for smug bald men than I cared to remember. My life at Winslow, Brown bore about as much resemblance to Gordon Gekko’s in Wall Street as my legs did to Cindy Crawford’s. But at least the rules for a successful career in investment banking were clear, and I knew how to follow them. My hours were long and grueling, and I frequently despised my colleagues and my clients, but my bonus checks were large and if I continued to play the game, I might be in a position to retire well before my fortieth birthday with several million in the bank, financially secure and independent at last. I changed the subject. “What about you? What do you do?”

“Me? Equally embarrassing. Very 1999.”

“What? Tell me,” I demanded.

“I run an Internet start-up.”

“How is that embarrassing? Now that really does sound glamorous. And hip. I bet you never have to wear a suit. And you probably get to take your dog to work.”

“Right,” he said. “I spend most of my time sucking up to venture capitalists and worrying about how I’m going to make the payroll.”

“Still, it must be exciting,” I told him, even though the very idea of so much risk and uncertainty was enough to make my blood pressure rise.

“It doesn’t seem so exciting when you can’t sleep because you don’t know where your next round of financing is going to come from,” he replied, but his easy tone suggested that he didn’t really lose much sleep.

“Maybe I could help,” I started to offer, when a sharp elbow jostled me and a spike heel stamped down on my foot. Icy liquid splashed down my dress and a glass shattered on the floor, but I was blinded by pain and hardly noticed.

“Oh, dear,” I heard someone drawl in a faintly slurred lockjaw. “Now look what I’ve done. Darling, are you all right?” The black curtain of physical anguish that had swept before my eyes faded to jagged purple and white lines, through which I could make out one of Emma’s aged great-aunts gazing at me with tipsy alarm and wearing a dress that had probably been the height of chic when she’d purchased it from Monsieur Balmain’s house of couture back in the late 1950s. Its pattern clashed in an unfortunate way with the vibrating stripes that clouded my vision. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, even if you factored in the heft of her bee-hived hair, but I still felt as if a Mack truck had run over my foot.

“I’m fine,” I managed to gasp out. “Really.” You old bat, I added silently.

“Oh, but your frock, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing a little seltzer water won’t fix,” I said as politely as I could under the circumstances. She was still apologizing as Peter took me by the elbow and steered me across the room and through a swinging door into the kitchen. The room was busy with staff cleaning up the remains of the elaborate meal, but a harried waitress pointed us to a side pantry in answer to Peter’s inquiry about seltzer.

This was just great, I thought to myself as Peter guided me across the crowded kitchen. Only a moment ago I’d been managing to dance and have a conversation with an attractive man simultaneously. Now I had a huge splotch all over the front of my dress and had provided him with a choice demonstration of just what a clumsy oaf I was.

Peter led us through another swinging door into the pantry, a small room lined with counters and cabinets. “Alone at last,” he said with a smile that acknowledged the cheesiness of his words. “But that looked like it hurt.” His eyes were filled with concern.

“Which part?” I asked, trying to put up a valiant front. “The puncture wound to my foot or the destruction of a perfectly good Armani? Do you think I should get a tetanus shot? Matthew probably has his doctor’s bag around here somewhere.”

Peter put his arms around my waist and set me on one of the counters. This simple gesture was almost enough to make me forget the pain I was in. He knelt to examine my foot, while I studied the top of his head. I gripped the edge of the counter tightly to prevent myself from running my hands through his hair, which was full and sun-streaked, with a couple of adorable cowlicks shooting off in unlikely directions. “Okay, there’s no blood. And I don’t think anything’s broken.” He rose to his feet and looked at my dress. “I wish that I could say the same thing about the Armani.”

I quickly inspected the Scotch-and-soda-colored stain spreading across the creamy silk. “It’s not looking good, is it?”

“Well, if the seltzer doesn’t work, maybe we could just get a bottle of whisky and dye the entire thing?”

“I’m sure Giorgio would applaud your creativity,” I answered gamely.

Peter began rummaging through the cabinets. “Peanut butter, Ritz crackers, Miracle Whip—wow, we are deep in WASP country, aren’t we?” He held up the jar for me to see, an eyebrow arched with amusement. “Here we go.” He replaced the mayonnaise and lifted out a plastic bottle of club soda. “It’s not imported, but it will probably work, won’t it?”

He found a clean dishrag and doused it liberally with the bubbling water. I knew it was too much to hope for that he’d swab me down himself; still, I was disappointed when he handed me the towel. I began dabbing gingerly at the stain, more shocked by the unexpected impact this man was having on my usually tightly guarded emotions than the damage to my dress.

Peter was standing gallantly by, proffering more seltzer and tactical advice, when I heard tense words pouring in from the porch adjacent to the pantry. I froze, surprised, when I realized that one of the speakers was Emma. She was so soft-spoken—it was rare to hear her voice raised, much less laced with the bitterness that now infused her tone.

“You have no right,” she was saying. “God knows, you seem to hold the world record in screwing up, so why should I listen to you? It’s the only way to fix everything, and you know that.”

“Emma, honey. You don’t have to do this. It’s not worth it. We’ll call it off, we’ll figure something out.” When I looked out the window over the sink, I could see Jacob Furlong’s hawklike profile illuminated by a single porch light. Only the top of his daughter’s head was visible.

She let out a laugh that sounded tinged with hysteria. “There is no choice. You know Mother wouldn’t be able to deal. She’s shaky enough as is.”

“Your mother—” began Jacob, then stopped. He sighed. “Look, Emma, it’s time for us all to live our own lives.”

“Like you ever stopped?” she retorted. “Don’t you think it’s a little too late to start playing concerned father?”

Jacob looked like he’d been slapped. His craggy features seemed suddenly old and weary. He passed a hand slowly across his brow.

I looked at Peter and he looked at me. Silently, he helped me down from the counter, and we tiptoed back into the kitchen.

At least, Peter tiptoed.

I limped.

CHAPTER 3

The dining room was emptying out, and only a few swinging diehards remained on the dance floor. Judging by the unenthusiastic way the band was plodding through an old Sinatra tune, they seemed ready to call it a night. I spied Richard near the wood-paneled door that led out to the foyer, bidding the departing guests farewell. His double-breasted suit still looked as crisply pressed as if he’d just left the tailor, and a silk handkerchief peeked neatly from his breast pocket. I’ve never understood American men who insisted on dressing like Eurotrash.

A moment later, Emma joined him, her lips tightly set in a strained smile. I guessed that she’d walked around the outside of the club and reentered through the front. Richard slung his arm across her thin shoulders in a proprietary manner that made me want to slug him. It was all I could do not to rush to her side, pull her free from his slimy grasp, drag her into a corner and find out what was really going on. I couldn’t recognize my best friend in the woman I’d overheard arguing with her father just a few minutes before, and I was even more concerned and confused now than I’d been all through dinner.

But she and Richard were surrounded; the odds of getting a word with her in private were slim. I would have to wait until the party was over.

Peter and I headed back to our table, picking our way through the maze of abandoned tables and scattered chairs. The gentle pressure of his hand on the small of my back ignited a minor fire that radiated from the base of my spine up my vertebrae, around my neck and up to my cheeks, which felt distinctly flushed. At least the pleasant warmth managed almost completely to eclipse the pain in my foot, if not the uncomfortable thoughts in my head.

Thankfully, the bland cousin and Richard’s dreary colleague had disappeared, leaving only my friends, who seemed ready for the evening to be over. They had pulled their chairs away from the table and into a small circle. Jane had kicked off her shoes and was resting her feet in Sean’s lap. He rubbed her toes with the practiced expertise and serene composure of a happily married man. Matthew was ribbing Hilary about something or other while Luisa looked on, her eyelids drooping with the late hour. She’d arrived just that morning on an overnight flight from South America.

As we approached, they looked the two of us over with uniformly bemused expressions. My rather long and distinguished trail of romantic disasters was common fodder for group conversations, and I could tell they were looking forward to having some new material with which to enjoy themselves at my expense.

Peter made his introductions while I sank into an empty chair. If he noticed the way that Jane elbowed Matthew or how Hilary raised one inquisitive eyebrow he didn’t show it. He bore up well under Luisa’s coolly assessing gaze and acted like he didn’t see the exaggerated wink Sean gave me or the finger I flipped back at him.

Jane and Luisa bent forward to examine the stain on my dress. “It doesn’t look good, Rach.” Jane’s voice was somber. When it came to weighty matters of what could and could not be removed from fabric, Jane was an expert. I gazed down at the brown splotches despondently. The soda water treatment may have lent some romantic intrigue to the evening, but it hadn’t done much to undo the damage wrought by Emma’s great-aunt.

“However,” said Luisa in a stage whisper, “something else looks quite good.” She shot me a knowing glance. I tried to muster up a haughty look, but instead the flush in my cheeks deepened even further.

“Well, I think the time has come,” Matthew announced. “If we don’t get out of here soon they’ll be kicking us out. Peter, you’re staying at the Furlongs’ house, aren’t you? Do you need a ride there?”

“That would be great,” said Peter. A lock of hair had fallen across his forehead, making him look even more adorably boyish than he had before. “I took a taxi straight here from the station so I don’t have a car. Let me just go get my bag—I left it in the cloakroom.”

“I’ll go with you,” Matthew volunteered, putting a hand on Peter’s unsuspecting shoulder and guiding him toward the exit. Sean gently removed Jane’s feet from his lap and rose from his seat to follow them.

“We’ll see you all back at the house,” he called over his shoulder with a barely disguised grin. This was more of a commandment than a suggestion. I watched their blue-blazered backs head toward the door, with Peter caught innocently in the middle, and inwardly groaned. The two of them could never resist the chance to play big brother, even though I had two of my own who were required by blood to play the role and did so exceedingly well. Peter would be thoroughly interrogated by the time they got back to the house, at which point Matthew and Sean would let me know in no uncertain terms if they found him a suitable candidate for me.

I sighed and turned my head to meet the unabashedly curious looks of my old roommates.

“Well?” asked Hilary.

“Well what?” I retorted with, I hoped, dignity. She stretched out one long bronzed leg and kicked me. Fortunately, she’d removed her high-heeled sandals. I tried to stare her down, but after a couple of seconds gazing at her jade green eyes I began to giggle.

“He’s cute,” said Jane. “I mean, I know old married women aren’t supposed to notice these things, but he really is very cute. And you certainly seem to think so. I haven’t seen you blush like this in years. He seems nice and normal, too.” In direct contrast to the sort of guy I usually went for, she was no doubt thinking but was too kind to say. She ran a hand through her bobbed brown hair, which gleamed in the dim light. Her arms were tanned against the simple blue sheath she wore.

“Quite handsome,” agreed Luisa, her faint South American accent elongating her words. She pulled a cigarette from a silver case and lit it with an engraved lighter before returning the case to an embroidered black evening bag. She inhaled luxuriously, exhaling a stream of smoke from her full lips. For what must have been the millionth time I wondered how she managed to keep her lipstick on for an entire evening.

“But why is he friends with Richard?” demanded Hilary. “I mean, do we know if he’s worthy? Can he possibly be worthy?” Ah. The question on all of our minds. Trust Hilary to be the first to pose it aloud.

“Oh, do be quiet, Hilary,” said Luisa. “Rachel’s a grown-up. She can take care of herself.” These were disingenuous words from the woman who’d taken it upon herself to cancel a date she deemed “inappropriate” for me our senior year.

“I’m sure the Inquisition will have that all figured out in no time,” I said, referring to Matthew and Sean. I paused then continued in a more serious tone. “I have to admit, I have the same concern. I mean, Peter seems smart and nice, and he’s a really good dancer and he smells incredible, and he’s got the most wonderful eyes and he has a great sense of humor—and did I mention how good he smells? But he’s a friend of Richard’s.” The way I said Richard’s name could leave no doubt as to how I felt about him. “Peter said that the two of them grew up together and that they haven’t really been in touch for years. And he seemed pretty surprised that Richard wanted him to be his best man. That’s a good sign, but is it enough to outweigh being friends with Richard in the first place?” I looked around for affirmation. I’d learned long ago that, when it came to men, my judgment left much to be desired and it was wise to seek a second opinion.

“Speak of the devil,” muttered Hilary. I followed her gaze and saw Richard nearing the table with Emma trailing alongside. She looked exhausted; even her long, golden hair seemed to droop with fatigue.

“Girls, how are you?” asked Richard in that fake hearty way I hated so much, acting as if we were all the best of friends. Girls, indeed. Normally I wouldn’t get too worked up about politically incorrect terminology, but coming from Richard this was particularly irksome. I bit my tongue to keep from pointing out that we’d just attended our ten-year college reunion.

“We’re just fine, Dick,” answered Hilary, giving him a big smile. He didn’t even flinch.

“Emma,” I called. “Come sit with us. We haven’t gotten to spend a minute with you all night.”

“I’d love to,” she said, her quiet voice hoarse from all of the talking she’d had to do that evening. “But I have to get back to the house. My mother’s completely stressed out about tomorrow and all of the logistics, and she wants to go through the master plan one more time. If she’s calm enough, maybe we can all have a nightcap by the pool?” Richard didn’t wait for us to respond before he started shunting her toward the door. “I’ll see you at the house,” she called, casting a wistful look over her shoulder.

“God, I hate that man,” said Hilary, not waiting for them to be out of earshot. She angrily brushed a strand of platinum hair back from her face.

“Of course you do,” said Luisa. “He’s appalling.”

“That’s one word for it,” I said.

“What is Emma thinking?” asked Jane.

“We could sit here all night without answering that,” said Hilary, sounding uncharacteristically dejected. She stood up abruptly, smoothing her short skirt over her thighs. “Let’s go.”

The club’s valet was nowhere to be seen and the parking lot was nearly deserted as we made our way out to the car I’d borrowed from a colleague for the weekend. It was a huge black Suburban that made me feel as if I were driving a tank on the way up from New York.

“Does anybody else feel like driving?” I asked. “I probably shouldn’t.”

“Why—too much to drink or too dazzled by love?”

“Shut up, Hil.”

Jane took the keys and we piled into the car, lapsing into silence as she swung onto the narrow country road that led from the club to the Furlongs’ house. An air of sadness settled over us; doubtless, each of us was thinking about Emma and Richard and the ceremony that would take place the next day. On top of that, I still had the exchange I’d overheard between Emma and her father spinning in my head.

If anyone had asked us to take bets years ago as to which one of us was most likely to make a disastrous matrimonial mistake, the odds would have been on me as the winner, hands down. Yet here we were, on the eve of Emma’s wedding, and I desperately wished that I could find even one thing I liked about the bridegroom, or at least a sign that maybe things would work out for the best.

Unfortunately, when it came to Richard, there just wasn’t much to like. Even I had to admit he was handsome, although that fluke of biology was completely offset by the disproportionate level of interest he took in his clothes. He was also clever and knowledgeable, able to hold his own on topics ranging from high finance to obscure Scandinavian writers.

When Emma first showed up with Richard on her arm, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I never knew for sure what exactly had happened between him and Luisa all those years ago. But during the months that Emma and Richard dated and then the months during which they’d been engaged, I hadn’t discovered even one mildly redeeming quality.

That Richard had fouled a deal I was involved in soon after he and Emma started dating was just the tip of the iceberg. I’d been representing a major publishing house in the acquisition of a boutique literary press. Richard, an agent for a number of well-known writers, had quietly lured away the boutique firm’s bestselling author, a loss that reduced the value of the acquisition tremendously. My client was too far down the acquisition path to retreat without losing face in the industry; the letters of intent had already been signed. The acquisition went through, although the price my client paid was widely criticized by Wall Street. The company’s stock price had languished since.

The client blamed the mishap on Winslow, Brown, and the Winslow, Brown partner who’d insisted on taking the lead on the deal, enjoying all the hobnobbing it entailed with the literary world, did his best to deflect the blame onto me once things went sour. This was an easy task in the firm’s testosterone-heavy environment, where a woman’s competence was always in question. I calculated that Richard’s coup had added at least six months and probably a year to the already onerous path to partnership at my white-shoe firm.

To a certain extent, the sequence of events was business as usual. As “expert” advisors, we should have negotiated contingencies into the original agreement that protected our client in the event that a significant change in the target company’s author list occurred. For that oversight we could only blame ourselves. You could also argue that Richard was only doing his job—the author he’d stolen away signed a much more lucrative deal with another publishing house.

What bothered me was that Richard knew that I was involved in the deal, or I assumed he did, because I’d found him in my study during a cocktail party at my apartment, leafing casually through my notes on the preliminary negotiations. He didn’t even have the grace to look flustered at being caught, but just glibly explained that he was looking for a piece of paper to write down a phone number. I wordlessly pointed to the blank legal pad that sat front and center on my desk, returned the file to the drawer in which it had been stowed, watched while Richard pretended to jot something down, and escorted him out of the room.

While this was enough to earn Richard a place of honor on my blacklist, it was far more than a professional grudge that fueled my dislike. Quite simply, I was convinced that his interest in Emma had everything to do with gold digging and social climbing and nothing to do with love and respect.

Emma was one of the most compassionate, well-intentioned people I knew. However, growing up in the shadow of two exceedingly good-looking, glamorous parents hadn’t done much for her self-esteem. She’d had a few boyfriends, but even she had seemed to recognize that they tended to be more interested in the vast wealth she’d inherited from her mother’s blue-blooded family, the fame of her artist father or even in her nascent reputation as an artist in her own right than in her as a person. Overall, she was woefully inexperienced with men and doubtful that anyone would ever love her for the right reasons, no matter how frequently I listed her many virtues in an effort to bolster her confidence.

Yet all her insecurities seemed to melt away under the sheer force of Richard’s initial onslaught. In the early days of their relationship he romanced her aggressively. He deluged her with flowers and chocolates, intimate dinners, weekends in the country and extravagant gifts, and Emma was overwhelmed. For several months she was glowingly happy, and I was eager to believe that he was on the up and up, at least as far as Emma was concerned. I even tried to be nice to him when I saw him, which wasn’t easy.

Even before they were engaged, however, he rapidly downshifted into taking her for granted. He’d cancel arrangements with her at the last minute or arrive late without an apology, let alone an excuse. There were no more flowers or chocolates, although he did seem to take a fastidious interest in the gifts they registered for at Tiffany’s. Instead of intimate dinners, or weekends in the country, Richard turned his attention to the types of events covered by the society pages, displaying Emma on his arm like a trophy. It was around then that I started to avoid making plans to see them together and would instead arrange to have lunch or dinner with Emma alone. But when I did see Emma, she seemed despondent, and the radiant excitement she’d once shown when she spoke of him had dulled.

I’d tentatively tried to broach the subject with her a few months after they announced their engagement. We’d met for a late dinner at a quiet restaurant near her loft, and after I’d had a glass of wine I worked up the courage to ask her if everything was all right between Richard and her. Up until that point our conversation had skipped easily from a movie that we’d both seen to a discussion of my work and then of her work. Emma had her first gallery show when she was only twenty-one, and although there were more than a few disgruntled followers of the New York art scene who complained that Emma’s father had smoothed her way, few could dispute her artistic talent. Whereas her father’s work was still entirely abstract, Emma focused on landscapes and portraits that inspired comparisons to Edward Hopper and John Singer Sargent. The first show as well as the ones that followed in the ensuing years met with great critical acclaim. Now, however, she seemed worried. “I think I have the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block,” she confided. “I can’t get anything done.”

It was then that I asked her about Richard, thinking that the question would seem like a natural part of the discussion. I had hoped that she would open up a bit and allow me the opportunity to voice my concerns. Instead, it seemed as if an invisible wall suddenly went up around her. “Oh, Richard’s just fine,” she answered quickly, and then she abruptly changed the subject.

The rest of our conversation that night was stilted, and I went home wondering if I should have forced the issue but hesitant lest I should alienate her. Her response had felt like a warning to me, a clear sign that she did not want to talk about her relationship with Richard. And, except for the occasional glancing reference, we didn’t talk about him in the months that followed. It was awkward maintaining a friendship when there was such a large and obvious topic that we danced around without discussing.

This wasn’t the first time that I’d been upset by how Emma let herself be treated like a doormat by a boyfriend. But this time was serious; it was marriage.

I hoped she knew what she was doing. I sure didn’t.

CHAPTER 4

It was easy to lose one’s way on the twisting roads that led to the Furlongs’ house. Streetlights and signposts were kept to a bare minimum, and the trees effectively blocked out the sky. I suspected the families who had houses in the area preferred it that way—the last thing they wanted was to point out their tranquil country refuge to strangers.

Yuppies from Manhattan and Boston had already descended upon old-money enclaves in the Hamptons and Cape Cod. From Water Mill to Osterville, and even on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, they were busily buying up modest summer cottages for exorbitant prices, tearing them down and replacing them with sprawling mansions. Their slick German luxury sedans and Land Rovers clogged the country roads and vied for parking spaces with the battered Buicks and Lincolns favored by WASP holdouts.

By comparison, the Furlongs’ corner of the Adirondacks had remained pristine. The general store in town continued to do a healthy trade in Wonder bread and domestic beer. If you were looking for goat cheese, Chilean sea bass, or imported mineral water, you were definitely in the wrong place.

It was so dark that Jane nearly missed the turn for the Furlongs’ house. The stone pillars on either side of the gate were almost completely hidden by bramble, and ivy draped over a faded sign that read Quail Lake. Luisa dug the slip of paper on which she’d written the gate code out of her purse, and Jane rolled down her window and punched the numbers into the keypad. The wrought iron panels slid soundlessly apart and then closed shut behind us.

The house itself was nearly a mile from the road, and we were quiet as Jane carefully steered along the narrow drive. I listened to our wheels crunching on the loose gravel. The thick woods on either side contributed to a sense of isolation that had always felt peaceful when I’d visited before. The crisp northern air with its scent of pine brought to mind unbidden memories of long-ago evenings as a child at summer camp, an unfortunate experiment initiated by my parents in the vain hope of instilling in me a love of nature.

We rounded the last turn and the house came into view. From this angle it looked deceptively modest. Every time I came here I wondered how Mrs. Furlong managed to maintain the wooden shingles in exactly the same state of shabbiness, not quite dilapidated but dangerously close. In this case, however, looks were completely deceiving. There were five bedrooms in the house, along with a number of rooms for sitting and lounging, all luxuriously appointed in a manner that was so discreetly expensive that only the most finely trained eyes could appreciate the value of the well-worn rugs, the graceful lines of the Early American antique furnishings, and the sheer scale of investment required to maintain such a lavish household in this simple but elegant comfort.

Light spilled from an upstairs window onto the wide circle before the house. Jane parked the truck next to the line of cars that had accumulated in the clearing along the edge of the drive. I recognized Mrs. Furlong’s aged Mercedes convertible, Mr. Furlong’s even older Volvo, Richard’s spanking new BMW, and Matthew’s battered Saab. Only family members and family equivalents were staying at the house tonight.

The front door was unlatched—the gate at the drive and the high fence around the property made locks unnecessary—and we passed through it single file just in time to catch Lily Furlong ascending the stairs to the second floor. Hearing us come in, she paused and turned to greet us, stifling a ladylike yawn in a delicate fist.

“Oh, there you are, girls,” she said, giving us all a warm smile. “We were getting worried that you’d gotten lost. The roads up here can be so confusing. Did you all have a nice time at the dinner? And, Rachel, what a lovely toast you gave! It was very charming, dear. I know Emma was touched by it.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” I said. Somehow, even when I knew I was saying the right thing, Mrs. Furlong always made me feel gauche.

“Well, I was just about to turn in. We have such a big day ahead of us tomorrow. I think the boys are all sitting out by the pool having a nightcap if you want to join them. The seamstress is coming early in the morning to put some final touches on Emma’s dress, and the poor child was exhausted, so I sent her to bed.” I was sad to hear this; I was impatient for some time alone with Emma before she became Mrs. Richard Mallory. I toyed with the idea of following Mrs. Furlong upstairs and waking Emma up but resolved instead that I would sit her down for a long talk in the morning, seamstress notwithstanding. Besides, I doubted if Mrs. Furlong would appreciate my interfering with Emma’s mandated beauty sleep.

Lily smiled tiredly in our direction. “You all know which rooms you’re staying in, don’t you?” We nodded our acquiescence. “Good, good. Well, don’t stay up too much longer,” she called over her shoulder. “I don’t want any of you ladies dozing off tomorrow during the ceremony. Everything must be perfect for Emma’s big day.”

We bid her good-night, and I led the way toward the back of the house. I’d spent so many summer vacations as a guest here that I knew nobody would begrudge us taking a bottle of champagne from the kitchen refrigerator and borrowing four plastic tumblers from a cupboard.

We’d decided in the car that some private time was in order, so we let ourselves out the kitchen door and tiptoed down the path that led to the lake. I could hear the low rumble of male voices from around the corner of the house, but we continued toward the dock. One by one we removed our shoes and padded out along the planks that stretched over the water.

We lowered ourselves down to sit side by side at the end of the dock, dangling our legs over the edge. The icy water was soothing, and I waggled my toes with pleasure; my feet had had a rough evening, between the three-inch heels I’d worn and the damage Emma’s great-aunt had inflicted. A promising lump was beginning to rise on my instep. I peeled the foil off the top of the champagne bottle and gently worked the cork free. It came loose with a subdued but satisfying pop, and I poured some of the sparkling wine into each of our glasses and passed them down the row.

“Should we toast?” I asked when everyone had a drink in hand.

“Toast what?” asked Hilary. “The wedding?” She made no effort to disguise the sulky tone in her voice.

“No, I’m definitely not in the mood for that,” said Jane. Things were bleak indeed if even Jane couldn’t find a way to put a positive spin on the situation.

Luisa didn’t say anything, but I heard the familiar sounds of her cigarette case opening and the swoosh of her lighter. I wondered idly how many cigarettes she’d smoked that day. Her cigarette case seemed, magically, to be always full of imported Gauloises.

“God,” said Hilary, taking a big gulp of her drink. “I can’t believe Emma’s actually going through with this. If only there were some way to talk her out of it.”

Jane had stretched out on her back to observe the night sky, but now she struggled back up into a sitting position and turned to face us. “You know, I’ve tried to talk to Emma about Richard and the wedding and everything. More than once. I thought that coming from me, since I’ve already been married for such a long time and everything, it might have some weight. But she shuts down as soon as you try to talk to her about him. She just gets really tense and says that everything’s fine and then changes the subject.”

“It’s true, Hil. I’ve tried to talk to her, too,” I said. “And it’s pretty much a guaranteed way to end a conversation of any depth with Emma. I don’t understand it at all. I mean, it seems so obvious that she’s not really happy with him. She’s clearly not eating enough or sleeping well, and she can’t get any work done. But she also seems determined to go through with this.” The argument she’d had with her father had made that all too clear.

“I know all that,” answered Hilary, exasperated. “The last time I was in New York I kept her up half the night haranguing her about all the rumors I’d heard about Dicky when we both lived in Los Angeles, after college. All of the sleazy business deals and random affairs. He was notorious when he was there, he really was. And Emma didn’t bother to deny any of it, or to defend him. In fact, she didn’t even get upset. I sort of thought it would piss her off, my saying all of those things. But she just nodded her head and didn’t say anything except that she’d be fine and not to worry about it. It was like talking to a wall.”

Luisa exhaled an impatient stream of smoke. “Look, Hilary, I’ve spoken to Emma about Richard as well. When she came to me about the prenuptial agreement—”

“What? Emma signed a prenup? Why? She’s the one with all of the money!” Hilary was incredulous. So was I. This was the first I’d heard of a prenuptial agreement.

“Mierda. I thought you all knew. Forget I mentioned it.”

“The cat’s out of the bag on this one, Luisa. You might as well tell us the whole thing now,” said Jane.

“Did Emma’s parents make them sign one? To protect her in some way from Richard?” I asked. That would have been a relief.

“No, no. Nothing like that. It was all Richard’s idea. Apparently he insisted on it.”

“Richard’s idea?” I repeated. “I don’t get it.” Emma’s family could buy and sell Richard a hundred times over. I doubted that they had any interest whatsoever in his assets, whatever they might be.

“But,” protested Hilary, “isn’t the point of a prenup to make sure that the person with the money gets to keep it in case of a divorce?”

“Usually,” said Luisa, lighting another cigarette.

“Well, what does the prenup say?” I asked.

“I don’t know—I never read it. As far as I could tell, it was already a done deal when Emma came to me. Richard and his lawyers had prepared it, but Emma needed to review it with independent counsel before she signed it, and she wanted me to help her find someone. I had to send her to another firm, of course. We focus on international commerce, not New York State law, let alone domestic affairs.”

“Why didn’t she go to her family attorney?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine that people as wealthy as the Furlongs didn’t have an entire battalion of lawyers at a discreet midtown firm, watching out for their interests and billing for every six minutes of service.

“She did. But for whatever reason they suggested that she get someone else to represent her. It seems hard to believe, but perhaps their firm doesn’t have a department that handles marital law.” Luisa sounded skeptical. Or, I thought, reading into what she’d left unsaid, they couldn’t advise Emma, in good faith, to sign it.

“I don’t get it. Why would Richard insist on a prenup? I mean, if Emma’s the one with all the…” Jane’s voice trailed off. She was too well brought up to remark explicitly on Emma’s extraordinary wealth.

“Ugh. God only knows what goes on in Richard’s slimy little mind. He probably had some slimy reason of his own,” said Hilary.

“Maybe he was trying to prove that he didn’t have any slimy reasons,” Jane ventured. She insisted on looking for the good in everyone, even when there was none to be found.

“Oh, Richard’s all about slime and slimy reasons,” said Hilary. “I don’t trust his motives one bit. I bet he can’t wait to get his hands on Emma’s money.”

“From what I’ve heard, he already has,” I said. “There are rumors in New York that the Furlongs are the silent partners backing Richard’s new agency. They’re only rumors, but where there’s smoke there tends to be fire in situations like these. I don’t know where else he could possibly have gotten the money. The offices are gorgeous, and the launch party he had must have cost a fortune.”

“You’re kidding,” said Jane in disbelief.

“I wish,” I replied.

“What a skunk,” said Hilary. “You’d think he could at least wait until after the wedding to start raiding Emma’s bank account.”

“The money’s certainly attractive to him, but I think he’s even more excited about all of the other advantages that come with being part of the Furlong family,” said Luisa.

“What do you mean?” Jane asked.

Hilary snorted. “Come on, Jane. Money can buy some things, but not everything. Talk about a name that opens doors! Emma’s father is literally world-famous and has all of these incredible art world connections. And Emma’s mother is related to half of American history, what with all of the Winthrops and Mathers and Jeffersons in her family tree.”

“And let’s not forget the Astors and Rockefellers and Du Ponts,” I added.

“Plus all of the things that money can’t really buy,” Hilary continued. “All the Social Register bullshit and seats on philanthropic boards and photos in W and Vogue. Oh, and did I mention club memberships? Dicky’s probably drooling over the prospect of his own locker at the Racquet Club.”

“Okay, okay, I get the point,” said Jane. “But if this is all so clear to us, why isn’t it clear to Emma? What is she thinking?”

In the moonlight I saw Luisa arch one thin dark brow. “I wish I knew. It’s as if she’s sleepwalking through the entire thing.”

“Maybe there’s something to Richard that we can’t see,” Jane said.

“Like what?” Hilary challenged. “He loves animals? He’s kind to his mother?”

“I don’t think even that’s true,” said Luisa dryly.

“Emma’s not stupid,” Jane answered. “And while her taste in men has always—” she struggled to put it delicately “—left something to be desired, she’s always figured it out in the end. There must be something good in him.” She was clearly hoping that if she said it enough times she would start to believe it.

“Well, whatever it is, he’s managed to keep it pretty well hidden,” said Hilary.

“That’s for sure,” said Luisa.

“Here’s what else I don’t get,” said Hilary. “Even if Emma’s been suckered by Richard, I can’t imagine her parents falling for him. They’re much too savvy. And Emma’s so close to them—if they had any objections, she would have taken them seriously. But they—well, especially Mrs. Furlong—seem completely gung ho about this wedding. It sounds like it’s going to be a real three-ring circus, what with the hundreds of guests and two bands and champagne flowing out of fountains.”

I wondered if I should say anything about the exchange I’d overheard earlier between Emma and her father. It was bad enough that I was guilty of eavesdropping. Surely I shouldn’t compound the sin by gossiping about things I hadn’t been meant to hear. “Maybe her mother’s doing the entire parental reverse psychology thing,” I replied while I was internally debating the merits of full disclosure. “You know, where they don’t want to tell you exactly what they think because they’re afraid that that will make you do exactly what they don’t want you to do? Or that if they tell you what they think and you go ahead anyway, the situation gets really awkward?”

“Is that how they handled these things when you were growing up in Ohio?” asked Hilary. My midwestern childhood had provided almost as much amusement to my friends as my romantic history, particularly after they discovered that Leave It to Beaver was set in my hometown. In fact, Ward Cleaver had once boasted to his sons about having been the best kite flyer in all of Shaker Heights in his youth. That my parents, with their thick Russian accents and bookish ways, bore not even the faintest resemblance to the archetypically all-American white-bread Ward and June Cleaver didn’t seem to matter.

“No need to be snotty,” I said, but even I recognized that my reverse parental psychology hypothesis was fairly lame. I decided to go for full disclosure. “Besides, regardless of what Emma’s mother thinks, I’m pretty sure her father’s not too happy about Richard.” I briefly told them about the argument I’d overheard. I felt slightly guilty, as if I’d betrayed a confidence, but I was so worried about Emma. Perhaps I was hoping that somebody could explain what I’d heard in a way that would make everything all right. I was out of luck, however; my friends found this information just as disturbing as I had.

“What could possibly make Emma talk to her father like that?” asked Jane, shocked.

“I don’t know. They’ve always had such a good relationship. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her raise her voice to him before.”

“He was really telling her to call it off?” Luisa asked.

“He was practically begging her to,” I confirmed.

“Unbelievable,” said Hilary.

“I know.”

“It must feel awful to be about to get married and to have so many people expressing their concern to you,” reflected Jane. “Marriage is scary enough when you’re confident you’re doing the right thing and so is everyone around you.”

“Yes, but you were doing the right thing when you married Sean,” Hilary pointed out.

“I really wish I could feel as good about this as I felt when you two were getting married,” I added wistfully.

“I wish I could feel as good about this as I did when we were getting married. Still, we should be supportive of Emma. She must have some good reason. Maybe she really loves Richard. And whatever her reason, we’re Emma’s best friends. We should try to give him the benefit of the doubt.” Jane’s voice, however, betrayed her lack of conviction. She’d never been a good liar; even the simple white lie was beyond her.

“What doubt?” asked Hilary. “There is no doubt. Richard is a complete and utter snake.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Luisa agreed. “But it still doesn’t explain why Emma’s going through with this.”

“She’s making a major mistake,” said Hilary.

“She really is,” I agreed.

“He is a disaster,” said Luisa.

Jane sighed. Her optimism was tapped out. “He sure is.”

We lapsed into an unhappy silence, sipping the chilled wine. The light from a half moon glossed over the gentle ripples on the water’s surface, and clouds moved slowly across the black sky. I breathed in the clean air, taking in the quiet brilliance of the night. In Manhattan it was probably well over eighty degrees, and so humid that the sounds of traffic and sirens would seem muted by the oppressive heat. Still, even with the heat and humidity, I would rather have been there than in this beautiful spot, dreading the day to come.

Hilary was the first to break the silence. Her voice was calmer now, and she spoke casually, as if she were picking up on a discussion that we’d started a few minutes ago but hadn’t finished.

“So. Is this a pact we’re going to keep?”

CHAPTER 5

I woke up early the next morning and couldn’t fall back to sleep. This was highly irregular—I was famous in certain circles for my ability to sleep deeply and at great length, no doubt as a result of my usual work-induced state of sleep deprivation. Perhaps on some level I already knew what had happened and my curiosity to know yet more nudged me awake.

My mouth was dry and my head fuzzy from too many drinks the previous evening. All that champagne, and then the vodka tonics, and then even more champagne, had seemed like such a good idea at the time. But now I had a pounding headache, and every muscle in my body ached, and I had only myself to blame.

I was sharing Emma’s room, but she was still sleeping in the other twin bed, and, eager as I was to talk to her, it seemed criminal to disturb her peaceful slumber. Careful not to wake her, I slipped out from under the down-filled comforter, exchanged my nightie for a pair of cutoffs and a cotton sweater, grabbed a few Advil from my bag, and tiptoed down the stairs in flip-flops to search for something to wash the pain relievers down. The house was quiet, and the hands of the kitchen clock told me it was only half past six, a time of day that I hadn’t seen on a weekend in at least two years.

I reached into the refrigerator, took the pitcher that the Furlongs’ housekeeper kept filled with freshly squeezed orange juice, and poured myself a tall glass. I swallowed the pills down with a generous slug. Then I stepped through the kitchen door and onto the porch that wrapped around the house. Between the Advil, the juice, and the fresh air, I hoped I would shortly feel brand-new.

I strolled past the long oak table and wicker chairs where the Furlongs ate their meals during the summer and paused at the railing. Sipping my juice, I took in the panorama before me. While money couldn’t buy everything, it could most definitely purchase beauty and access to beautiful places. The view from the porch was breathtaking. Beyond the mirrored surface of the lake, the distant hills were thick with pine, and while the sky was still hazy, the early morning fog was beginning to recede, yielding to an intense, cloudless blue. In the foreground, the lush green of the lawn and gardens led down to the water’s edge. The tapestry was marred only by the billowing white tent that had been erected to one side, an ominous reminder of the ceremony that was to take place that afternoon.

It was gorgeous weather for a wedding. Richard had probably insisted on it when he made his pact with the Devil. I sighed, dreading the day ahead.

From the corner of my eye I could see the glint of the pool, which Emma’s mother had installed around the other side of the house the previous summer to better accommodate some of her more squeamish friends from the city. Emma and her father had argued with her about this for years, saying it was absurd to put in a pool when the cool expanse of lake stretched only a hundred yards away, but Lily had ultimately won out. Not everyone, she’d protested, was comfortable swimming with the water snakes and other slippery creatures that made the lake their home. And what Emma’s mother wanted, she inevitably got. So the pool had gone in beside the house, along with a pool house that contained changing rooms, a sauna and two guest rooms, each of which undoubtedly could have swallowed my New York apartment in one gulp.

I continued along the porch to get a better look at the additions. We’d arrived just in time for the wedding rehearsal the previous day, and after that we had to rush to change for dinner. This was my first chance to check out the pool and the pool house in the clear light of day.

Maybe it was the lurking possibility of wildlife that caused my heart to skip a beat when I glimpsed a dark shape floating on the water’s surface. I don’t know what I thought it could have been—a bear or some sort of mountain lion, perhaps?—but living in Manhattan had rendered me both alert to danger and skittish about animals that weren’t on a leash. I reminded myself that the porch stood several feet from the ground and gingerly made my way around the corner and toward the pool for a better look.

I noted with relief that the shape was neither furry nor moving before I registered that it was Richard. One of the custom-made shirts that usually hung just so from his lean frame was plastered to his torso, and his wet black hair gleamed in the sun. His face was in the water, but I knew it was him and I knew he was dead. It seemed somehow unjust that he should go just like Gatsby, when he had none of Gatsby’s charm or surprising innocence. That was my first thought. My second thought was muffled by my own deafening shriek.

Matthew came running out of the pool house in boxer shorts and a faded T-shirt, toothbrush in hand. “Rachel—what is it? Are you—” He stopped short when he caught sight of the body. Before I could respond, he dropped his toothbrush and dove into the water, flipping Richard over with the practiced moves of a lifeguard. I watched, paralyzed, as Matthew hoisted the body up out of the water and checked for a pulse. “Call 911!” Matthew yelled to me, already beginning CPR.

“I just did,” I heard a calm voice say behind me. “They’re on their way. I gave them the gate code, so they’ll be able to get in.” I turned, startled. Luisa was standing in the open French doors that led to the downstairs sitting room. Her curvy figure was wrapped in a silk kimono, and her dark hair hung nearly to her waist, freed from its usual thick knot. She pulled her silver cigarette case and lighter from a pocket. Her expression was almost bemused, and she dropped her voice, speaking as if to herself. “It looks like it’s too late, though, doesn’t it?”

The click of her lighter melted my paralysis, and I ran down the steps to the pool. I crouched next to Matthew, listening to him counting under his breath as he pumped Richard’s chest. “Come on, you bastard, breathe already,” he muttered.

I watched him for what felt like hours but was probably only a minute or two. Finally, he sat back on his heels and shook his head. “He’s dead,” he told me. He glanced at the back of his hands, lightly freckled and sparsely covered with light-brown hair, as if in disgust at their inefficacy. He seemed unaware of the water streaming from his drenched clothing to puddle at his feet.

I looked at the body stretched on the flagstones before us. In death Richard looked a lot like he had looked in life—just paler and wetter. His icy blue eyes stared unblinking at the sky, and his thin lips were bloodless and tinged with purple. I shivered as Matthew leaned over and gently smoothed his eyelids shut.

I heard footsteps and voices as other members of the household appeared, awakened by the uproar. Hilary stepped onto the porch dressed in a leopard-print negligee. She rubbed sleepily at her eyes, visibly grumpy at the disturbance. There was some distance between us, but from where I was I could have sworn she brightened considerably when she got a good look at the scene before her. “What have we here?” she asked in a tone that sounded more excited than distraught. She leaned over the wooden railing to get a closer look. Luisa grabbed her elbow and admonished her in a low voice.

Hilary was followed by Jane and Sean. I knew that happy couples frequently tended to start dressing alike, but surely their matching striped pajamas were a little much, even if they hadn’t deliberately intended to match? They joined Hilary at the railing and made a quick assessment of what had happened. “Dead?” Sean asked, his arm grasping Jane around her waist. I nodded.

Emma’s mother was right behind Jane and Sean, her petite form swathed in a simple terry bathrobe that she wore with the same unstudied elegance as the Chanel suits she favored in the city and the designer sportswear she wore in the country. Absent her usual subtle makeup and with her dark gold hair hanging loose about her shoulders, Mrs. Furlong looked like an eerily faded version of Emma. “What—?” she started to ask. Then she took in Richard’s body and let out a shriek that made mine seem distinctly amateur.

Emma ran out after her mother, a long T-shirt hanging halfway to her knees. She looked no older than she had freshman year. “Mother—what’s wrong?” she cried, her voice trailing off as she followed her mother’s gaze. “Oh. Oh. Is he…is he…?” A wave of white washed the color from her face.

Matthew looked up at her wordlessly, his expression blank. Hilary and Mrs. Furlong caught her as she crumpled to the floor.

I wasn’t sure when, exactly, Emma’s father arrived, but I remembered that he was panting, having run from his studio in the old stables. He stopped short at the edge of the pool area where the grass gave way to flagstone. I’d just noted his presence when I heard cars pulling up the drive toward the house. Their sirens echoed in the quiet morning air, the sound ricocheting from hill to hill.

I had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if I had woken up in an Agatha Christie novel. The only missing pieces were the vicar and Miss Marple.

CHAPTER 6

The first question to ask was whether Richard had committed suicide. But I knew the chances of that were all but nil.

Richard had treated the world, and everyone and everything in it, like his oyster. He was far too self-important to even play with the idea of putting an end to himself. And even if he had, he would never have arranged to die by drowning. He had been a varsity swimmer in college, before practices and meets began putting too much of a damper on his playboy aspirations. There was no way he would ever do anything that would call into doubt his erstwhile athleticism. Much less expose his handmade English shoes to chlorine. No, Richard would write a long and vindictive suicide note before blowing his brains out in such a way as to keep his handsome face intact while splattering enough blood and guts and gore to make cleaning up after him a royal pain in the ass.

I couldn’t have been the only one thinking such thoughts as the paramedics went through the appropriate motions over Richard’s body. The local police officers who’d arrived shortly after the ambulance had immediately roped off the pool area with bright-yellow tape. They now spoke in low voices off to the side, trying to look as if possible foul play was a staple of life in this remote corner of the Adirondacks. Sean had picked up Emma after she fainted and carried her inside, escorted by Mrs. Furlong and Jane and followed by Luisa and Hilary.

Matthew had disappeared into the pool house, but he quickly reemerged in a dry T-shirt and shorts and came to perch beside me on the steps leading up to the porch. We watched Mr. Furlong talking to the paramedics, his lined face inscrutable.

“What do you think happened?” Matthew asked me in a low voice.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “If he were anyone else, I would guess that he had too much to drink or something and fell in. But Richard could always hold his liquor. Maybe he slipped, and hit his head, and then fell in?” I was angling for death by accident, and I was eager for Matthew to validate my hopes with solid medical evidence.

Matthew was quiet for a moment, as if carefully choosing his words. “I don’t think he drowned, Rach. I think he was dead before he hit the water.”

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“I don’t know, at least not for sure, but I was doing CPR on him, pumping his chest. If Richard were breathing when he went underwater, he would have water in his lungs. If he had water in his lungs, it’s almost impossible that some of it wouldn’t have come up. But none did.”

I considered this. A police photographer had arrived to record the scene for posterity and, I would assume, for evidence of a crime. She asked Mr. Furlong and the paramedics to back away from the body.

“There’s something else,” added Matthew. “His pupils were dilated.”

“What does that mean?”

He sighed. “I see a lot of ODs—overdose cases—at the clinic. And their eyes look a lot like Richard’s did.”

“He OD’d?”

“Possibly.”

“But Richard didn’t use drugs.” In fact, I remembered him holding forth in a nauseatingly self-righteous way on the topic, complete with several ideas about how the war against drugs should be fought. That most of his suggestions would violate the civil rights guaranteed by a number of constitutional amendments hadn’t seemed to bother him.

“I’m not necessarily talking about heroin or cocaine.”

“Even pills. He didn’t even like to take aspirin when he had a headache—he thought it was for wimps.”

Matthew shrugged. “This is all speculation, Rach. I don’t know anything for sure.”

I ran my hands through my disheveled hair. Had Richard been drugged, poisoned in some way, without his knowledge? Did someone kill him, perhaps slipping something into his drink, and then push him into the water in an attempt to mask the crime?

And while part of me wanted to know the answers to these questions, part of me was scared to find out.

I’d thought that nothing could be worse than Emma marrying Richard, but maybe I’d been wrong. If Richard had been killed, it meant that someone here—one of this close-knit circle of family and friends—was a murderer. And that was an idea I didn’t like one bit.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying not to think about Emma’s pained exchange with her father the previous evening, or Luisa’s rapid appearance on the scene this morning and surprising composure, or Hilary’s ill-contained excitement, almost bordering on glee. And then, of course, there was Matthew.

I opened my eyes and looked over at him. He was silently watching the paramedics and police, his expression neutral. I’d realized long ago, however, that Matthew wore his plain, unassuming face like a mask. This wasn’t the first time I’d wondered what he was thinking.

Matthew was Emma’s boy-next-door in just about every sense of the word. His mother and Mrs. Furlong had been friends since birth, practically, classmates at both Miss Porter’s and Wellesley. He’d grown up in a discreetly luxurious apartment a few blocks up Park Avenue from the discreetly luxurious apartment in which Emma’s family lived. The Furlongs had been regular guests at the Weirs’ summerhouse in the Hamptons, and the Weirs, including Matthew and his elder sister, Nina, had visited the Furlongs’ Adirondack camp for a few weekends each year. The two families had vacationed together, whether on the beaches of Saint Bart’s or on the slopes of Alta. They had celebrated holidays together, as well—Thanksgiving in the country and Christmas on Park Avenue. Nina and Matthew were in college when their parents were killed in a car crash, and in the years that followed the Furlongs had become their surrogate family.

Matthew’s family tree was even more lushly hung with cash than Emma’s, if such a thing were possible. Regardless, he was one of the most down-to-earth people I knew. I had first met him when Emma and I were freshmen, sharing a double room in Strauss Hall. He was then in his second year at Harvard Medical School. He came by during Freshman Week, per the orders of Emma’s parents, to take Emma out to dinner and make sure that she was adapting smoothly to college life. He arrived bearing an armful of flowers to brighten our drab dorm room and a tin of brownies to mitigate Emma’s well-documented chocolate cravings.

He was funny-looking, tall and gangly with shaggy brown hair, a beaky nose and bright-blue eyes. Even if his features had been more regular, he wouldn’t have been my type—even then I preferred them dark and neurotic. Still, he had a quiet strength of character, and he seemed so genuinely nice and trustworthy that he put one instantly at ease. He was clearly smitten with Emma, who treated him exactly like one would treat a big brother, with a mixture of affection and annoyance. Matthew was a fixture in our lives all through our college years, during which he finished medical school and his internship and began his residency at Mass. General.

Matthew played the big brother role flawlessly, not only to Emma but also to her friends. He rescued us from the endless succession of tasteless cafeteria meals with dinners at unusual restaurants in far-flung corners of Boston. My parents had done their best, like most immigrants, to embrace American culture. So with the exception of the occasional meal of borscht or blinis, I’d grown up on the relatively bland food that they felt was typically American. It was Matthew who taught me to enjoy the rich spices of Indian curries, the intricate blend of flavors in Vietnamese dishes, and the stinging pungency of wasabi. While we stuffed ourselves, he listened to our anguished stories about unwritable papers and unbearable crushes, providing kindness, advice and affirmation along with sustenance. When Emma and I joined Luisa, Jane and Hilary in our sophomore year in Lowell House, he adopted them as easily as he’d adopted me.

Matthew had a life of his own, and he even had the occasional girlfriend. But it was clear to everyone that he and Emma were meant to be together—at least, it was clear to everyone but Emma. The rest of us debated endlessly about when Emma would finally figure it out. Even when Richard and Emma had announced their engagement, on some level I was always confident that eventually it would be Matthew and Emma who would one day make their wedding vows to each other.

Now it looked like that once again was a possibility.

The paramedics had bundled up Richard’s body in a zippered black bag and taken it away, but a host of technicians had joined the police photographer. A couple were busily dusting for fingerprints on the pool furniture and using hand vacuums to collect any shreds of evidence that might lie on the flagstones. The others had disappeared into the pool house, where I assumed they were exploring the guest room Richard had occupied. Mr. Furlong was talking to the policemen on the far side of the pool. The original two had been joined by another two who I guessed were detectives since they didn’t wear uniforms. I could tell from his posture that Mr. Furlong was angry, and I could also tell from their postures that the policemen were intimidated. Mr. Furlong was not a force to be toyed with. His every gesture radiated strength, even when it was as simple as running a paint-stained hand through his bristly gray hair.

With an exasperated shrug he turned from them and made his way toward where Matthew and I were sitting. “What’s going on?” Matthew asked him. “What do the police think happened?”

Mr. Furlong gave Matthew a tired smile, but his eyes were cold as he spoke. “Our local law enforcement experts are intent on blowing up what was clearly an accident into a major event.” The way he said experts made the word sound like an obscenity, and his voice still bore a faint twinge from his Louisiana upbringing. “This is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened up here in a long time. They don’t get many opportunities to use all of their fancy equipment, and they want to make the most of it.”

“They don’t think it was an accident?” I asked.

Mr. Furlong responded to my question with a bitter laugh. “They find the circumstances suspicious and feel that they need to look into the situation more closely. I explained to them that my daughter just lost her fiancé and it would be appropriate of them to demonstrate at least a bit of courtesy, but they’re insisting on talking to everyone present. They also ask that nobody leave the premises until given permission to do so. As if we don’t have enough to worry about with hundreds of guests arriving this afternoon for a wedding that’s not going to happen.”

“Is there anything we can do?” asked Matthew.

Mr. Furlong flashed him a grateful look and responded quickly, as if he’d already thought everything through. “Could you make sure that the police do whatever it is they have to as quietly and quickly as possible? Put them somewhere in the house and make sure they talk to whomever it is they need to talk to and don’t harass anyone. You could probably use the downstairs library.”

“Sure,” Matthew agreed.

But Mr. Furlong had already turned away from us. “I’ll be in my studio if anyone needs me,” he called over his shoulder. I was taken aback. Was he really just going to abandon the situation and return to work?

“Unbelievable,” said Matthew, his voice barely audible, giving words to my own reaction. Then he pulled himself up from the steps and, with a parting pat on my shoulder, ambled over to the policemen.

CHAPTER 7

Unbelievable, indeed.

The Furlongs, so I’d always been led to believe, were the consummate happy family. But I was having difficulty reconciling this long-held conviction with Mr. Furlong’s nonchalant delegation of responsibilities, not to mention the cryptic and heated exchange I’d overhead between him and Emma the previous night. Surely he should be carefully supervising the activities of the police or rushing upstairs to check in on his daughter, and perhaps even his wife, rather than deserting to his studio? He didn’t seem to fully appreciate the gravity of what was happening. If someone in the household had killed Richard, it would be better for one of us to figure it out before the police did so that the situation could be managed properly. Not that I had any idea what would constitute proper management in such unusual circumstances, but I could cross that bridge when I got there. Years of training in sorting out data and figures had made the orderly arrangement of information almost a religion to me, and one thing I had learned was that you had to have your fact base in place before you could make any good decisions.

I rose to my feet and headed through the French doors to the living room. At this time of day, it was bathed with early morning light, which spilled over the glossy butter-yellow walls and comfortable furniture, all upholstered in variations on the theme of chintz. This was the room where Emma and I had spent most of our evenings when I’d visited before, sprawled on sofas reading or playing Scrabble around the coffee table with her parents or Matthew.

I was confident that Jane, with her usual unflappable calm and organizational prowess, would have the situation well in hand upstairs, so I paused to gather my thoughts. My eyes settled on the collection of silver-framed photographs on top of the gleaming Steinway, including a black-and-white picture of the Furlongs on their wedding day. Lily was radiant in a satin dress that accentuated the graceful lines of her collarbone, and Jacob was resplendent in a morning suit. He had the dark good looks of a young Sean Connery, and they set off Lily’s delicate fairness beautifully.

Over the years, I’d learned a lot about Emma’s family, not only from Emma herself but from magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue, where you could often find articles about Emma’s grandmother, Arianna Schuyler, who had rivaled Jackie Onassis as an icon of style and elegance, or about Lily and Jacob, who had been one of the most prominent couples in New York for decades. I knew that Lily’s parents had quite a different husband in mind for their youngest daughter, somebody who shared their own blue-blooded and Ivy-draped backgrounds.

Instead, Jacob Furlong was the son of a dirt-poor Louisiana farmer. He broke upon the New York art scene in the mid-1960s with a splash that was as much about his bold paintings as it was about the notoriety he quickly gained as a man about town. His picture was just as likely to appear on Page Six of the New York Post, which breathlessly chronicled his exploits with companions like Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, as it was to appear next to a favorable review in the New York Times or ArtWorld.

But the press he received in his early years in New York was nothing compared to the scoopfest that began when he started squiring Lily Schuyler around town. The Schuylers epitomized old-guard society, and Lily shattered convention in her unusual choice of a beau. It was hard to imagine where the two of them even crossed paths, but somehow they did. And after a whirlwind courtship, they announced their engagement. The Schuylers were stunned by the willfulness and determination with which Lily met their objections. Never before had she strayed from the path they’d set out for her, nor were they prepared for the onslaught of charm combined with tenacity that Jacob used to overcome their misgivings. Lily withdrew from Wellesley after her freshman year, and she married Jacob in June of 1970 in front of five hundred guests at Saint James Episcopal on Fifth Avenue.

If you were going only on the photographs before me, the elder Schuylers’ fears were unwarranted. The pictures documented the happy life of a golden couple, complemented by their golden-haired daughter and a wide circle of friends. There were photos of the Furlong family with socialites and artists, corporate titans and noted intellectuals, all set against the background of the world’s most expensive and exotic locales.

Without warning, I felt a pang of sympathy for Richard. While I was beginning to suspect that the golden surface masked complex depths, if you saw only the surface it would be easy to think that it was an accurate representation of life with the Furlongs. What little I knew about Richard’s childhood suggested that it had been a far cry from this Elysian existence. I could only imagine the appeal that the Furlongs would have held for him, perhaps not only for the ambitious and avaricious reasons my friends and I had discussed just a few hours before while we sat on the dock, but as part of a far more human desire to be a member of a real family.

It was odd to think of Richard having such a basic need for familial warmth and security. The most unlikely emotion he’d ever stirred in me was empathy, even when I met him more than a dozen years ago at Harvard. Then, he was a senior and already the ultimate in dashing sophistication. He presented such a seamlessly polished face to the world that it was hard to imagine any sort of emotional neediness. Emma had always been a soft touch—sophomore year she’d brought home the meanest stray cat in existence, who promptly shredded the upholstery on the sofa in our common room and gave lie to the assumption that any cat can be litter trained. She only agreed to give him up when she’d placed him with a family in Cambridge. Perhaps emotional neediness was the quality that drew Emma to Richard, the trait that kept her with him long after he stopped making her happy. Richard was the human equivalent of the mean stray cat, albeit better groomed.

But somehow I knew that wasn’t the answer, the secret to her motivations. I wondered what the real answer was, and if it had been connected in any way to the end Richard had met.

That was an unsettling idea.

I heard the slap of tennis shoes descending the front stairs, and the sound dragged me back to the present with a guilty jolt. I hadn’t meant to spend so much time on a psychological retrospective of Richard Mallory. Sean entered the room at a brisk pace, and his burly, familiar form was a welcome distraction. He’d changed out of his pajamas into a pair of khakis and a faded polo shirt. His simple presence was reassuring, not only because of the sheer bulk of it but because his character was so solid and dependable. If a WASP could be a mensch, then Sean won that title hands down.

Jane was lucky enough to meet Sean early our freshman year, when he was a junior. They were both on the sailing team, which was a haven for hard-core outdoorsy-variety New Englanders. Sean was one of the cocaptains of the Varsity team, and Jane, a former medalist in sailing at the Junior Olympics, was the rare freshman to bypass JV altogether to take a place in the first boat. The two of them were well matched, with the clean bone structure, long healthy limbs, and sun-streaked hair that were the most common by-products of generations of WASP in-breeding. They also shared the same easygoing, down-to-earth way of navigating the world. They dated almost continuously throughout college, and their wedding on the Cape the summer after we graduated felt inevitable, from the blond-haired flower girl to the white tent that shielded the guests from the cool winds blowing off the Atlantic. It was hard to believe that they had been married for more than ten years, especially when the rest of us had so steadfastly maintained our single states. At least, all of us except Emma.

“Hey, there, Rach,” he said, his trademark grin diminished in deference to the morning’s events. He crossed the room to join me by the piano and put a large comforting hand on my shoulder. “How are you doing? You got quite a wakeup this morning, didn’t you?”

It had been so hectic that it hadn’t occurred to me that I was, in fact, a bit shell-shocked at having awakened to discover a body, but I decided not to think too carefully about that. There would be plenty of time to process it all later; figuring out how Richard had died would have to take precedence for the time being. “I’m okay,” I said. “A little freaked out, but I’ll get over it. More importantly, how’s Emma?”

“I’m not sure. Jesus. I’ve never seen anybody faint dead away like that. I took her upstairs and then Mrs. Furlong shooed me off. Jane and Luisa and Hil are up there, too, so she’s in capable hands. I thought I’d come back down to see if I could help out with anything.”

“Matthew’s out by the pool dealing with the police,” I offered. “I’m sure he’d appreciate a little moral support.”

“Right,” said Sean. “I’ll go see what I can do.” He started toward the door.

It occurred to me then that he might be able to shed some light on things. “Hey, Sean,” I called out, “wait a second.”

“What is it? Is everything all right?” he asked, pausing and turning back to face me. The sun pouring in through the open doorway silhouetted him, and his bulk cast a long shadow across the floor.

“I was wondering—you had a nightcap with Richard last night, didn’t you? Out by the pool?”

“Yep. All the guys did. Just a quick drink and a little male bonding before we went to bed.”

“Did everything seem…normal?” Normal seemed like a lame word choice, but Sean would know what I meant. I was hoping for easy enlightenment, something that could explain—without implicating anyone I knew or cared about—how Richard had ended up floating facedown and lifeless in the pool.

“Did everything seem normal?” he repeated thoughtfully, his hand on the door’s brass handle. “Yeah, as far as I could tell. Nothing strange happened that I noticed. Nothing out of the ordinary. That’s what’s so weird about this whole thing. I mean, Richard seemed like his same old self.” Sean was too nice to say what Richard’s same old self was like. He’d known Richard longer than any of us—they had both lived in Eliot House while at Harvard, an enclave that prided itself on its reputation for preppy elitism. “Lowest GPA, highest starting salary,” bragged the house T-shirt one year, only partly tongue-in-cheek. They also belonged to the same finals club, one of a handful of exclusive fraternities housed in discreet redbrick buildings around campus. Neither Eliot House nor the club really suited Sean, but he was reluctant to be the first Hallard in five generations to stray from tradition. Both of these venues gave Sean ample opportunity to get to know Richard, and I knew from comments that Jane had let drop that his opinion of Richard was no higher than my own.

Sean continued, “It’s so bizarre to think that there we were, just a few hours ago, talking about how the Yankees are doing this season and other nonsense, and the next thing you know…” His voice trailed off. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.”

“I keep wondering what could have happened. There must be a good explanation, but for the life of me, I have no idea what it is. I thought for a moment that maybe he committed suicide, but Richard was as far from suicidal as…” He didn’t finish his sentence, unable to find the appropriate simile.

“Was he really drunk?” I asked, trying to mask the hopeful tone in my voice. It felt awkward and inappropriate to probe like this, but I desperately wanted to believe that it had, in fact, been possible that Richard could have had so much to drink that he could have fallen into the pool and been too far gone to save himself. Matthew’s assessment and Richard’s well-documented ability to hold his liquor notwithstanding, I was definitely rooting for accidental drowning as the cause of death. If suicide was out of the question, the only other alternative was less than appealing.

Sean considered this for a moment and then gave a decisive shake of his head. “Well, he seemed to have had a good bit to drink, but we all had. And he’s always been able to drink even the most serious drinkers under the table. I think the rest of us were far worse for wear than he was. I was practically ready to pass out by the time I went in to bed.” He flashed me a self-deprecating smile. “Quiet married life hasn’t done much for my level of alcohol tolerance. I only have a hazy memory of Jane coming in, although, according to her, I really distinguished myself on the snoring front last night.”

I had to laugh. Sean’s snoring was legendary, capable of raising roofs and setting windowpanes to shaking in their frames. Then I thought about what he’d said. If Sean had gone to bed before Jane, he must have come in before 2:00 a.m., which was when I’d arrived in the bedroom I was sharing with Emma, also a little worse for wear from several hours of steady drinking, after my friends and I had decided to call it a night. Almost unconsciously, I started putting together a mental chronology of the early morning’s events.

“Did the other guys go to bed when you did?” I asked.

“No,” Sean said with another shake of his head. “I was the first to go. Jane and I were going to take advantage of being up in the country to take a long run before all of the wedding action began.” Some people, myself included, exercised for normal reasons like wanting to look cute in one’s clothes. Jane and Sean, however, actually thought exercise was fun. I’d always prided myself on being able to stay friends with people who enjoyed marathons but didn’t find them sufficiently challenging.

“Still,” Sean went on, “everybody was getting tired. I don’t think they lasted that much longer.” Especially not Richard, I couldn’t help but think with morbid humor.

“So, let me get this straight,” I summarized, “you all were drinking by the pool while we were out on the dock, you then came in before two, we all came in around two, and you’re not quite sure when the rest of the guys went to bed but you think it was pretty soon after that.” That meant that whatever happened took place sometime between two and six, which was a big window for foul play.

He gave me a quizzical look and then grinned again, more fully this time. “What’s going on, here, Rach? You thinking of tossing in your banking gig to become a private investigator?”

I gave him a sheepish smile. “I don’t know. Do you think I’d be any good?”

“Good or not, I don’t think it pays enough to keep you in the style you’d like. You might want to stick with Wall Street.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said.

“Any time. Now, assuming you have no more questions, Madame Detective, I’m going to go make myself useful.”

“That’s Mademoiselle, to you. And you’re dismissed.” He gave me a mock salute and I waved him out the door.

CHAPTER 8

I found my friends upstairs in Mrs. Furlong’s sitting room, where the air seemed infused with palpable relief. Or perhaps I was just projecting my own emotions. Mrs. Furlong was bent over her desk, sorting though piles of papers, while everyone else looked on expectantly, still dressed as they’d been when we’d discovered Richard’s body.

“Hi,” I said to announce my presence.

Mrs. Furlong looked up at me, a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose. Her usual air of gracious composure appeared to be firmly back in place, as if the woman who’d emitted the bloodcurdling shriek at the pool had been someone entirely different. I wondered if she’d learned how to deal with situations like this one in finishing school along with French and needlepoint.

“Hello, Rachel, dear,” she said. “The girls and I realized that it’s going to be a scramble to cancel all of the arrangements for this afternoon. I’m trying to get everything together so that we can get on the phone and start calling the various tradespeople and the guests. It’s nearly eight, and I think it would be all right to start making calls around eight-thirty or so.”

“Where’s Emma?” I asked. “How is she doing?”

“This is such a shock for her, poor thing,” said Mrs. Furlong. “We gave her a sedative and put her to bed in my room. It seemed like the best thing to do.”

“I just checked on her again and she’s asleep,” added Jane. “It’s probably better this way than making her deal with everything right away.”

“Wow,” I said, at a loss for any but the most banal words. “I can’t imagine what she must be feeling right now.”

Hilary rolled her eyes. She was standing behind Mrs. Furlong and safely out of her line of sight. Fortunately, she omitted the snort that usually accompanied this familiar expression of impatient disgust.

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